The LiquidPlanner Blog

LiquidPlanner 2.0 is live

It’s been just over a year since we launched LiquidPlanner with barely more than a scheduling engine and some novel ideas on how to transform project management. In that time, we’ve incrementally shipped many new features like email integration, re-worked old features and refined our ideas on what makes a great productivity tool.

We’re very excited about this release since it completes our first year’s product roadmap. It is a big update, worthy of rolling the version number to 2.0, and it presented our dev team with some interesting design and engineering challenges.

The theme for the update was roughly “more professional, more social”.

More professional

The flagship feature is our professional timesheets that allows teams to do serious time-tracking. There are whole products that do this kind of tracking; building these features into LiquidPlanner was no small task.

We staked out several design principles that we held true to:

Timesheets would be a free upgrade

Planning and tracking features would be seamless

Timesheets would be a customer choice (on | off)

Timesheets should be insanely easy to use

Like everything we build, we’ve been using these features internally for many weeks and spent lots of time focused on getting the fit just right. We could not have done it without help from some of our favorite customers who reviewed mock ups and gave us feedback; big thanks to Flight Path, Hand Crank Films, and all the others.

More social

You cannot spend a day with the LP team without hearing someone say “social project management”. To that end, we’ve cooked up a little surprise for this update inspired by the explosion in micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter.)

Our new workspace chatter feature is social commenting with business purpose. Unlike Twitter, workspace chatter is private to your workspace and you automatically follow everyone in the workspace. Every project and task in the system is automatically setup as a conversation thread. You’ll be notified of any comment on anything you own or watch and you can watch all the comments using the new dashboard. You’re also not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

Our team is addicted to workspace chatter, it saves time, improves communication, and beats email hands down for task work; we hope you find it as useful and fun as we do.